Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes; spiritualism means the affirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope.William James

When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept—the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.John Updike

Scientific materialism has merely introduced a new hypostasis, and that is an intellectual sin. It has given another name to the supreme principle of reality and has assumed that this created a new thing and destroyed an old thing. Whether you call the principle of existence “God,” “matter,” “energy,” or anything else you like, you have created nothing; you have merely changed a symbol. The materialist is a metaphysician malgré luiCarl Jung

With regard to this question modern physics takes a definite stand against the materialism of Democritus and for Plato and the Pythagoreans. The elementary particles are certainly not eternal and indestructible units of matter, they can actually be transformed into each other. Werner Heisenberg

You need an ideology in order to exist.Bernanke (2010)

We must have an ideology. The other side have got an ideology they can test their policies against. We must have one as well.Margaret Thatcher

Ignorance is strength.G.W. Bush

… in a free market economy the purpose of inventing things is to create intellectual property rights.Kenneth Arrow

I do not deny the existence of material substance merely because I have no notion of it, but because the notion of it is inconsistent, or in other words, because it is repugnant that there should be a notion of it.George Berkeley

Religion makes us want to live;
Religion makes it easier to be decent;
Religion gives us a sense of purpose and meaning.Oliver Thomas

[War's] "horrors" are a cheap price to pay for rescue from the only alternative supposed, of a world of clerks and teachers, of co-education and zoophily, of "consumer leagues" and "associated charities," of industrialism unlimited, and feminism unabashed. No scorn, no hardness, no valor any more! Fie upon such a cattleyard of a planet!William James

I do not have to paint how dismal such a view of the world is.Rudolf Steiner

[Peace is] a dream and not a pleasant one at that; without war, the world would wallow in materialism.Helmuth von Moltke

The mind precedes all things, the mind dominates all things, the mind creates all things.Buddha

For that some should rule and others be ruled is not only essential, but beneficial, and at the point of birth people are divided into those to be ruled and those who rule.Aristotle

Reality is rational and rational is what is based on the Idea.Hegel

Schade um die Tatsachen.Hegel? Fichte?

Materialism is dead, but people don't know yet. Their grasp of the world is utterly obsolete. How can you keep believing in the individual, in free will, or in matter when science shows that nothing is as it seems.Houellebecq

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.Muriel Rukeyser

It is better to have bad astronomy than to have Westerners in China.Yang Guangxian (1597 - 1669)

The theory that thought is merely a movement in the brain is, in my opinion, nonsense; for if so, that theory itself would be merely a movement, an event among atoms, which may have speed and direction but of which it would be meaningless to use the words ‘true’ or ‘false’.C. S. Lewis

A matter of definition:

The reduction of problems to pseudo-problems is one of the most overrated philosophical stratagems of our age, one that often serves only to get authors off the hook when there are problems that they are unable to clarify.Graham Harman

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Objections against materialism

Believers have always detested materialists and relentlessly persecuted them. Even now, the materialist opinion is widely distrusted. Why? Let's look at some objections against what materialists stand for like lifestyle, ethics, and taste.

A serious objection voiced by adversaries is that materialism kills the beauty in life and denies the spirituality that distinguishes humans from animals. It allegedly rejects love, poetry, creativity, and the arts and replaces them by joyless vulgarity. Marvellous works of art could only have been made during religious ecstasy: cathedrals, frescos, paintings, and chorals, are the exclusive result of faith. Sublime music like the Hohe Messe and the Art of the Fugue by Bach could not have been written by an infidel (Bach himself might have had second thoughts about that: with his music in Et in unum and Erbarme dich he made fun of the text of these psalms). Our culture and our ideas are part of us. To reject them, which is what the materialists propose, would violate our nature. Another one: the medieval flourishing of Persian and Syrian culture was inspired if not caused by islam, but the barrenness that followed in islamic regions was not. However such assertions include no evidence that shows that a strong belief in a transcendental being or some other idol helps creating works of art or science that would not have been possible without ideological input or constraints. Great works of art and science clearly have been produced despite the restrictions imposed by a belief in some idol or doctrine. Strong hierarchies usually do not stimulate but obstruct innovation in knowledge and art. How incompatible ideology is with art and science was recently shown by the soviets, the fascists, the Chinese communists, and the islamists. The beauty in religious art is not what is religious in it but what is beautiful. The opinion that love of art is anti-materialistic is too weird to contradict; anyone interested in the subject has by now found out that emotions are effects of the limbic brain and that divine revelation is an endocrine effect.

Hobbes disapproved of liberty and denied equality (both are materialist values) because social stability requires a strong hierarchy; idealism and a feodal organization with its obedience to leaders are vital to prevent run-away anarchy and arbitrary tyranny. This is also the argument that the Chinese government used to defend the detention of Liu Xiaobo and other whistleblowers. Materialists reject that solution for stability because what causes social problems cannot be used as a remedy against them. Unsurprisingly that is always tried by ideots.

Some other objections:

Life and consciousness cannot be explained by atomism. Chemicals in test tubes do not live, minerals do not make love, and stones do not laugh. If an organism dies, it is obvious that something disappears and something non-living stays. So there must be more than dead matter.

What exists is not only matter. Information is real and immaterial, Information technology is based on that fact. Knowledge exists even without semiconductors or paper. Energy and money are not atomic composites.The basic axiom of the materialists is therefore wrong.

How can we have a free will and be responsible for anything if the motion of the particles that make up our brain is chaotic and determined only by physical laws?

The big bang, the beginning of the world, must have been an immaterial creative act. What non-existent entity could have created a material universe out of nothing?

Reality is made by the mind and mind is non-material: it is well known that the senses are unreliable and we cannot therefore observe an objective material reality outside us nor even its properties. We can only see what we want to see or what our mind allows us to see. Hence mind is fundamental.

Materialism, which all faiths repudiate, is immoral because humans have to believe in something before they can have moral norms at all. Without a faith, society degenerates in a war of all against all as Hobbes explained. Without an ideology, anything goes. Without a religion humans have the morals of alligators.

Materialism is also naive about human nature: people cannot function well without some ideological support. They distrust freedom, it frightens them. Without the certainty of a faith, life becomes insupportable.

History shows that people have always believed; of course they will continue to do so, religion is part of their essence.

Humans are social animals which strongly interact and their ideologies are the formal expression of that interaction. Because of their biological nature, humans cannot live together without ideology.

Materialists are inconsistent. They distrust ideas, yet claim that everything nonmaterial is an effect of matter. If ideas are produced by reacting molecules and ions, as they say, why renounce them?

Again, ideas set us apart from other (lower) organisms. Bacteria and plants have no culture, no art, no spiritual life. Rejecting idealism, ideots say, would mean rejecting our essence and going back to a reptilian subsistence. Nobody wants that.

Finally, James W. Sire, in his book "The Universe Next Door" wrote:
Naturalism holds that perception and knowledge are either identical with or a byproduct of the brain; they arise from the functioning of matter. Without matter’s functioning there would be no thought. But matter functions by a nature of its own. There is no reason to think that matter has any interest in leading a conscious being to true perception or to logical (that is, correct) conclusions based on accurate observation and true presuppositions…Why should whatever that matter is conscious of be in any way related to what actually is the case? Is there a test for distinguishing illusion from reality. Naturalists point to the methods of scientific inquiry, pragmatic tests and so forth. But all these utilize the brain they are testing. Each test could well be a futile exercise in spinning out the consistency of an illusion.

Countering those objections is left as an exercise for the reader. Sources and links, that can be found all over the EpistYlion site (notably on the Atomism page), may help. A Google search shows however that materialism is usually understood in the second sense (consumerism), while idealism is supposed to mean love for an ideal. Words, really...